The primordial abundance of helium and its subsequent
production in stars are primarily determined from
recombination lines in HII Regions. Accuracies better than a
percent must be obtained to make definitive tests of the Big
Bang. We report first results of a reinvestigation of the
formation of helium recombination lines. Our work builds on
previous studies by improving the physical treatment of
radiative recombination and the subsequent cascades. We
explicitly take fine structure into account by basing our
transition rates on the results of Drake [Phys. Rev. A 46,
2378 (1992)]. Previous methodologies were largely based on
variational calculations that did not include magnetic and
relativistic interactions, thus entailing an unknown degree
of inaccuracy. Comparisons with previous calculations are
presented along with an assessment of the remaining major
uncertainties. This work was supported in part by NSF and
NASA.

The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address
for comments about the abstract:
bauman@pa.uky.edu